PIERRE BONNARD | Jeune femme assise

Antoine Terrasse, Paris
Wildenstein & Co., London
The Honorable Lady Baillie, Kent (sold: Sotheby's, London, 4th December 1974, lot 10A)
Arthur Lenars & Cie, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint 1906-1919, Paris, 1968, vol. II, no. 815, illustrated p. 347

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In the early 1890s, Pierre Bonnard abandoned a promising career as a young lawyer to pursue painting at the Académie Julien and the École des Beaux-Arts. In those classrooms, the young Bonnard encountered such kindred souls as Édouard Vuillard, Odilon Redon, and Maurice Denis. Together, these artists called themselves the Nabis, a word meaning ‘prophet’ in Hebrew, and developed an artistic vocabulary that sought to capture the spiritual essence of the mundane and the intimism of domestic scenes. Jeune femme assise embodies this iconic intimism in a portrait of candid, feminine domesticity—a defining and reoccurring motif in Bonnard’s œuvre.

The work depicts a young woman sitting beside what appears to be a kitchen table. Dressed in a luminous yellow robe and likely fresh out of a bath, she is hunched over on a chair, focused on something at her feet. She has been caught entirely unaware in a fleeting moment in her private domestic space. The ephemerality of the scene is characteristic of Bonnard’s work, the artist being a keen observer of daily life and quotidian ritual. Despite the meticulousness of the model’s pose, Bonnard preferred to paint from sketches, memory and imagination rather than directly from life; as he once stated, 'I have all my subjects at hand. I go and look at them. I take notes. And then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream' (quoted in Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1998, pp. 9 & 30).

Bonnard’s mastery of capturing fleeting moments on canvas was no doubt influenced by the medium of photography. The artist’s earliest experiments with photography date to the period of his involvement with the Nabis; the group was predictably intrigued by the new technology and began to use it as a counterpoint to their painterly investigations. Though he never considered himself a serious photographer and certainly not an artist in that medium, Bonnard used his photographs as a compositional aid for his paintings and carried around a small Kodak camera which he used mostly to capture scenes of his family and everyday life (see fig. 1).

The primary model for Bonnard’s canvases that feature singular female figures was Marthe de Meligny, a young woman of elusive origin whom Bonnard met in Paris in 1893 but who would not become his wife and reveal her real name to him until 1925. Marthe remained Bonnard’s muse for nearly 50 years and would be depicted in every domestic setting possible by the artist (see fig. 2). Simply put, she was the central pillar of the domestic stability Bonnard enjoyed throughout his life and helped transform Bonnard’s artistic focus from dazzling urban streetscapes to serene and delicate interiors.

Given Bonnard’s early involvement with the Nabis, it is unsurprising that light and, more importantly, colour, were so imaginatively explored in his mature work. In Jeune femme assise the artist combines a loose, textured application of paint with rich patterning and colouration. These elements reveal the influence of post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat as well as his more direct contemporary, Henri Matisse. Bonnard’s perspective on light and colour reached a turning point in 1909, when he spent the summer at the house of his friend, the Fauve painter Henri Manguin, in St. Tropez. From this experience onward, Bonnard was captivated by the effect of the Mediterranean light, and the shimmering quality of this light permeates his mature output. In Jeune femme assise, the golden hues of the subject’s robe are juxtaposed against a symphony of pigmentation ranging between purples, pinks, peaches, and blue-greens that spread across the interior background, verging on abstraction.

As John Rewald writes, 'With the exception of Vuillard, no painter of his generation was to endow his technique with so much sensual delight, so much feeling for the indefinable texture of paint, so much vibration. His paintings are covered with colour applied with a delicate voluptuousness that confers to the pigment a life of its own and treats every single stroke like a clear note of a symphony. At the same time Bonnard's colours changed from opaque to transparent and brilliant, and his perceptiveness seemed to grow as his brush found ever more expert and more subtle means to capture the richness both of his imagination and of nature' (quoted in Pierre Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, p. 48).